Future
- 85 F-35A Lightning II are expected to replace the F-16 fleet, the number is probably cut to 42 due to rising costs and budget-cuts by the Dutch government. One F-35A has been delivered for the testing program and for training pilots and maintenance crew. This first aircraft is stationed at a base in Florida, USA.
- 20 NH90 helicopters will replace the former Navy Lynx helicopters. The NH90 helicopters will be stationed at Gilze-Rijen (8 NH-90 Naval Transport version and SAR) and De Kooy (12 NFH-90 anti-submarine warfare).
The Netherlands was the first country to sign up for the Production Sustainment and Follow On Development (PSFD) Phase of the F-35 Lightning II aircraft.
Through the NATO Strategic Airlift Capability, the RNLAF has access to three C-17s.
Read more about this topic: Royal Netherlands Air Force
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)